What makes Captain Jack tick...
Dec. 6th, 2006 07:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fajrdrakoI was thinking what an excellent metaphor a stopwatch is for Jack. Time is a central factor in his life. Once a Time Agent, he is now displaced in time; from once being able to travel to any era he wished, he is now stopped in time and forced to live one day at a time, like anyone else. For him, the number of days will be endless.
And he is living a countdown to two future events: the time in the twenty-first century when everything changes, and the return of the Doctor. We don't know when those events will be, and we don't know when Jack thinks they will happen.
Though I've been discussing a lot of my thoughts about Jack in various venues, I thought I'd put them down in more explicit form here. I might be wrong on any point, I might be Russelled at any moment, but here are my conclusions.
Since the chronology of Jack's life is unclear, I think of it as having three distinct stages:
- Past - before we meet him in the Doctor Who episode The Empty Child
In his past, he was a Time Agent, part of his memory was erased, he quite the agency and became a galactic con man in a stolen Chula ship. Running a con in 1941 London, he met Rose and the Doctor. - Turning point - from The Empty Child to The Parting of the Ways
Jack, because of an act of self-sacrifice meant to compensate for a danger he unleashed, gets a place on the TARDIS and stays there for an indeterminate length of time (three more episodes) with the Doctor and Rose. After that time, in another act of self-sacrifice, he is killed by Daleks, revived by Rose, and abandoned by the TARDIS. - Present and Future - Torchwood
Jack comes to Cardiff in or before 2007 or possibly 2008, and sets himself up in charge of Torchwood Three. Some time later, he takes Gwen Cooper into the team and the events we see in Torchwood unfold.
It is remarkable how much we don't know, in terms of the facts. We don't know how he travelled in time before or after he was on the TARDIS, but we know that he did - he has been to both pre-volcanic Pompeii and the 51st century. There is reason to think he is from the 51st century, as the Doctor seems to think so - I tend to take the Doctor's beliefs as usually reliable, given that he can see far into time and space and people's psyches. All we know for sure is that Jack got his weapon (the sonic blaster) from that time - and from the evidence of Girl in the Fireplace, we know that people in the 51st century could meddle with time, which might be taken as a partial corroboration. We know nothing about the Time Agency except that they had Agents. We don't know where Jack came from, but he passes as an American in 1941 London and 2007/08 Cardiff - possibly just to cover any odd cultural unfamiliarities.
And we have no idea how much subjective time has passed for Jack since The Parting of the Ways, or what happened to him between then and the beginning of Everything Changes.
The rest we know as a matter of surmise, and hints from Jack's running commentary on his own life. We know Jack likes sex, is flexible about categories, and has lived a sexually active life - twin acrobats, executioners, a Chula warrior, Estelle, Algy. We know he's good with technology, electronics and machines. Jack isn't very forthcoming on the what he has done, or when and where, but he's usually ready to talk about 'who'.
My interpretation:
Wherever he came from, Jack was living a life of somewhat increasing rootlessness. When he left the Time Agency, life as a free-lancer (or con man, or criminal, choose which term you prefer) he couldn't have had much stability - lots of casual sex, always on the move, presumably hunted by the Time Agents he was cheating.
So when he met the Doctor, two things happened. He found his own sense of courage and integrity - his own morality. Having endangered humankind in his con with the nanogenes, he risked himself to save others from the bomb.
The other thing that happened was that he fell in love with the Doctor and Rose.
Jack always talks warmly and positively about his former lovers; love comes easily to him, both physically and emotionally, but as he was always moving on, he couldn't let it reach him deeply. With the Doctor and Rose, he committed himself entirely - he wanted to stay with the Doctor on the TARDIS forever, just as Rose did, and was determined to prove himself worthy of the Doctor's love and trust. With the compatible company of the Doctor and Rose, he was free to be himself. It was as close to paradise as Jack could imagine.
This of course came to a sudden end when the TARDIS left without him. Whether he was Lucifer or Adam, I'm not sure, but Jack was left without an explanation for his expulsion from paradise - all the worse that it didn't happen as the result of a sin or even a mistake, but in conjunction with the greatest heroic act of his life, dying to save Earth from the Daleks. His phrase "see you in hell" is both ironic and poignant. With immortality, Jack was trapped forever in this purgatory.
My guess is that he used his skills with mechanics to get off the game satellite, and his gifts as a con man to make his way back to Cardiff, Earth, at a point sometime after the events of Boom Town. Because the TARDIS had once re-energized at the rift, he could guess the Doctor might take it back again, and Jack could be waiting there. He couldn't go back before the events of Boom Town for fear of meeting himself, changing time, and setting up the same kind of short-circuit of the universe that happened in Father's Day. But he could wait for the Doctor to return. I suspect he didn't go directly from the 2001st century to Cardiff of our time - I think the reason the faeries didn't kill him in Lahore in 1909 was that they knew he was immortal. He may have done some time-hopping to gather resources.
I would guess further that he arrived about the time of the Battle of Canary Wharf, or shortly before - so that when he tried to trace Jackie Tyler, or Rose, at the Powell Estates, he was too late to find them, and simply learned they were dead. I think he took advantage of his knowledge of extraterrestrials and his con man skills to get himself put in charge of Torchwood 3 at a time when Torchwood London was so in disarray that no one knew what was happening. I think he gathered (or stole) any memorabilia of the Doctor he could from Torchwood - the 1950s televisions, the 3D glasses, and so on. I think the 'period military' style he dresses in is a tribute to the circumstances in which he first met the Doctor.
Believing Rose to be dead, believing the Doctor had abandoned him, believing that living up to the higher ideals he had adopted was futile, Jack was embittered, depressed and alienated. He kept his friends and coworkers at a distance, and so never saw Susie's breakdown coming, and didn't notice that Ianto was hiding a Cyberwoman on the premises, or that morale was at a low ebb, or that Torchwood was increasing unable to fulfilling its mandate of preparing mankind for whatever is about to happen. In Gwen he saw a sense of humanity that pulled him out of his funk just when he woke up to the need for it - that any attempt to save the world from aliens (or itself) was doomed before it started if he couldn't manage a decent life for himself and improvement in Torchwood's capacity for teamwork and dedication to their purposes. He sees Gwen as giving them, or him, a second chance, with her innocent good nature and caring heart. She has given him a sense of hope.
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Re: Origins
Date: 2006-12-14 11:09 pm (UTC)Uh, disregard this thread [g].
Re: Origins
Date: 2006-12-15 12:42 am (UTC)Yes. Makes it confusing.
Jack told Gwen he died, was revived, and then was immortal. That conversation was at the end of "Everything Changes", which was after all the Doctor Who episodes he appeared in. We don't know how long, in his chronology - some fans thinks it's a century or so later; I think it was probably under a year, maybe six months.